Geoffrey Batchen Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography surveys the four decades prior to the medium's official birth in 1839. Batchen identifies a "desire to photograph", which begins to take hold of some curious minds around the 1790s. The ensuing three decades were a period of extensive experimentation, which culminated with photography's official unveiling before the Parisian elites.

Jorge Lopez in his review of the text says that:

Although Foucauldian studies of the photographic image have already been rehearsed by the likes of John Tag and more recently Jonathan Crary, Batchen remains concerned about the methodological impasse that such critiques have inadvertently posed: the project of emptying photography, as a medium, from any formal quality of its own, has ended up invalidating the very notion of photography. Indeed, the prevailing view in Anglo-american postmodern criticism defines photography as nothing but an instrument of power. Such an instrumental view rests on the idealist premise that operations of power somehow precede photography. Batchen combines Foucault and Derrida to argue that photography, like writing, is more than an inconsequential medium. Photography is, by definition, the writing of light. It is a paradox, a "message without a code" in which both nature and culture are directly implicated in a mutual play of power dynamics. Batchen advances the notion of "photopower" to reinvest photography with the value it lost to positivist aesthetics.